Fed Event: Tuesday Policy Forum Presents Nathan Hultman | “The Insufficiency of Sustainable Development: Why a New Innovation Agenda is Needed for the

The Insufficiency of Sustainable Development: Why a New Innovation Agenda is Needed for the Rio+20 Conference

April 24, 2012
12:15-1:30 PM
1203 Van Munching Hall

Nathan Hultman is Director of Environmental and Energy Policy Programs at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, and Associate Director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He is also a non-resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Washington DC. His research focuses on international climate policy, green growth, and private sector decisions to undertake low-carbon energy technology investments. Current projects include an evaluation of energy technology innovation policies for emerging economies; low-carbon investment decisions in Brazil, India, Korea, and South Africa; nuclear and biofuel energy transitions in Brazil, Sweden, and the USA; the Clean Development Mechanism and Technology Mechanism under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; and US energy technology portfolios. He has participated in the UN climate process since the Kyoto meeting and is a contributing author to the IPCC. Before joining the University of Maryland, Dr. Hultman held a faculty appointment at Georgetown University and was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation, & Society at the University of Oxford. He holds a Ph.D. in Energy & Resources from the University of California, Berkeley.

ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago, delegates met in Rio de Janeiro for the UN Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Earth Summit. That meeting sought to implement a new vision of sustainable development via the ambitious Agenda 21 and new treaties on biodiversity and climate change. This June, Brazil will again be hosting another major earth summit — the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, but known as “Rio+20.” With an equally ambitious agenda—covering energy, cities, food, water, oceans, disasters, and even jobs—this meeting provides an opportunity to revisit and redefine our failed international policies. In this talk, I discuss the successes and failures of the first Earth Summit, the role of massive international meetings in influencing the policy discourse, and evaluate the agenda for Rio+20. I argue that “sustainable development”, while capturing global consensus on a set of fraught and disparate topics, does not promise the transformative change that will be necessary to achieve development and environmental goals. I outline an alternative approach to “green growth” that foregrounds innovation rooted in diverse development contexts, and discuss possible policy approaches to realizing that outcome.